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Simpsons Stalwart Says the Show Already Addressed the Problem with Apu

A new book, Springfield Confidential, sheds light on the controversial character—who has already been benched from the show, according to writer Mike Reiss: “Hank Azaria saying he won’t voice the character anymore is like Val Kilmer announcing he won’t play Batman again—no one’s asking him to."

Apu is near death, according to the co-author of a new book on The Simpsons—which this week became the longest-running scripted series in the history of television. The book, Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for the Simpsons, by Mike Reiss—an original Simpsons writer still at the show—and Mathew Klickstein, author of a Nickelodeon oral history, contains scads of extremely funny and fascinating background material on everything from how The Simpsons came to foresee a Donald Trump presidency to why it’s unlikely an Itchy and Scratchy feature film will ever be made. There’s also material about tension between its creators.

Despite the show passing Gunsmoke on April 29 with its 636th episode, the most talked about Simpsons character in the news right now has hardly made an appearance in two years. That’s thanks to Hari Kondabolu’s 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu, which turns a critical eye on the Kwik-E-Mart proprietor—a stereotypical Indian immigrant with a thick accent who’s voiced by the white actor Hank Azaria. An April 8 Simpsons episode tried to address the issue, but ultimately let it go with little more than a shrug: Lisa and Marge Simpson facing the camera as Marge says, “Some things will be dealt with at a later date.”

“If at all,” Lisa adds.

But Azaria had a thoughtful response to the controversy during an April 24 Late Show appearance. “I think the most important thing is to listen to Indian people and their experience with it,” Azaria told Stephen Colbert. He added that if the character is to be eliminated or changed, he hopes that a South Asian writer or writers—none of which the show currently has on staff—will be asked to handle it. “I’m perfectly willing to step aside,” he concluded. “It just feels like the right thing to do, to me.”

Reiss’s response to Azaria displays some of the defiance that’s come to define the Simpsons writers’ room. “Though there’s a lot of discussion on Apu,” Reiss told me in an interview, “he’s barely had a line in the past three seasons. Hank Azaria saying he won’t voice the character anymore is like Val Kilmer announcing he won’t play Batman again—no one’s asking him to.” Reiss also said that the writers have been aware since even before Kondabolu’s documentary that there were issues with the heavily accented Indian-American convenience-store owner.

“There is all this hoopla about Apu, and the fact is we were cued into this three or four years ago. We did an episode then to address it,” he said. That was January 2016’s “Much Apu About Something,” which introduces Apu’s nephew Jay, a Wharton graduate who has shortened his first name from Jamshed—and is voiced, without an accent, by Utkarsh Ambudkar, an Indian-American actor.

The episode both delivered hoary archetypes and mocks them. Jay is an annoying hipster who calls his uncle “brah.” In an Italian restaurant, he accuses Apu of being a stereotype; a chef then emerges from the kitchen speaking in an accent straight from a 1950s commercial for canned ravioli: “Stereotype-a? Who’s a stereotype-a? That’s a spicy accusation.” His wife, an old Italian woman who has a faint mustache, swats him with a wooden spoon: “You pipe-a down.”

As Reiss said, Apu “has barely been in the show since then. People are saying, ‘Get Apu off the show.’ Well, he’s not on!”

Left, Apu and his wife are serenaded by Elton John in a Season 9 episode from 1997; right, Apu and his nephew Jay star in Much Apu About Something in Season 27.

Both photos courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/The Simpsons.

Springfield Confidential, which goes on sale June 12, is filled with deep-cut Simpsons history, from the story about a custom Homer Simpson-voiced G.P.S. misleading Reiss to a section that compares a gory Itchy & Scratchy supercut—produced to test the possibility of a spin-off—to “the brainwashing films Alex had to watch in A Clockwork Orange.” It also contains tidbits about other diversity issues, including a problem the show had in its first couple of years with animators in Korea. The animators were instructed not to make all of the background characters white; “in the next show they animated, all the homeless people and criminals were black,” Reiss and Klickstein write. Further instructions were sent.

Increasing diversity in the Simpsons writers’ room has been a challenge, Reiss said in our interview. First, much of the team—most of whom are white, Jewish, and alumni of the Harvard Lampoon—stays in place so long that openings are rare. But over the last decade, he said, the show has tried to mix things up: “We always hire the best people, and over the last decade they have been people of color and women, and that’s it,” he said—though the show can’t always hold on to those writers for long. “Sometimes it’s hard to keep them on the show because they’re so desirable in Hollywood. When you have someone with the Simpsons credit and they are a woman, they become super desirable in Hollywood, and they get hired away.”

In a section of the book devoted to burning questions, Reiss spends seven paragraphs responding to this one: “What do you say to people who say the show has gone downhill?” His response, in part: “When a show makes it to one hundred episodes, or a person makes it to a hundred years, that’s cause for celebration. Our show is a 658-year-old man. And you’re asking why it’s not as cute as it used to be? We’re lucky the Simpsons can still pee.”

There’s a section about the few celebrities, Bruce Springsteen among them, who have turned down guest roles on The Simpsons. (I want to, but won’t spoil George Takei’s unique rejection.) Regarding the 2000 time-travel episode in which President Lisa Simpson declares, “We’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,” Reiss writes that it’s important to remember,“‘President Trump’ was the punch line to the setup, “What’s the dumbest thing we could imagine America doing?”

No U.S. president or former president has agreed to guest-voice themselves on the show. The writing team composed a part for Bill Clinton and sent him the script. “While I’d love to do The Simpsons,” Clinton wrote back, “I’d never do anything to disgrace the office of the president.” Sometimes, Reiss and Klickstein write, “They write the jokes for you.”

But no matter how funny the show—and the book—may be, they’re currently overshadowed by the problem with Apu. A day after I interviewed Reiss, USA Today published an interview with Simpsons creator Matt Groening, mostly about the Gunsmoke milestone. The reporter also asked about Apu—and Groening replied, in essence, that the April 8 episode would be the show’s last word on the controversy.

In the book, Reiss offers a revelation about the birth of the character. Apu first appeared in the 1990 episode “The Telltale Head,” the eighth episode of The Simpsons, written by Reiss, Al Jean, Groening, and Sam Simon. The script refers to the character only as “Clerk.” His single line: “35 cents, please.” Reiss writes: “Because Hindu convenience store clerks were a movie cliche even back then, I inserted this stage direction under his line: ‘THE CLERK IS NOT INDIAN.’”

For years, Reiss thought Azaria had decided on his own to add an Indian accent; this is the Apu origin story repeated in The Problem with Apu. But in the book, Reiss says that according to Azaria, the voice was Simon’s idea. In our interview, Reiss added another wrinkle. During the script’s first table read, he said, Azaria had not yet been hired—so it’s possible an uncredited and forgotten voice-over actor was actually the first one to add the accent.

Passing the buck to Simon, who died in 2015, or a forgotten stand-in is a safe way to diffuse controversy over the origins of a potentially troublesome caricature. And it’s not the only way Springfield Confidential tries to shift the focus away from trouble. Reiss writes that almost no actor on the show plays what they actually are. “White guys play black men, straights play gays, and grown women play little boys. And Apu might be an unflattering stereotype, but that can also be said about lots of our characters, from Grandpa to Rich Texan. Groundskeeper Willie is pure cliche: a whiskey-swilling, haggis-eating, bagpipe-playing Scotsman—played by an Italian actor.” (He also opines that a joke is only in bad taste if it doesn’t get a laugh.)

“We’d hate to lose a beloved character from the show,” Reiss concludes in the book. “But times change, and maybe after three decades, time has run out for Apu. It’s not my call: as a white Jewish guy, I can’t tell Indians not to be offended by another white Jewish guy playing an Indian.”

After the Groening interview ran, Reiss e-mailed me and said it was probably best to limit his comments about Apu to the two pages he spends addressing the issue in the book. He added that if I didn’t think that was enough, I could use the line he’d said about Val Kilmer and Batman. A day later, he e-mailed to make it clear that the fate of Apu was not his call, ultimately: “All this will be decided by people above me.”

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The opening credits have transformed it into a giant whack-a-mole game, an electric chair, and a roller coaster, among countless other objects—but at heart, the Simpson family’s couch will always be the center of their all-American home.

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